So? I guarantee you, nothing will happen with it. The great advances of the past that have led to cell phones, Internet, and so forth are over. Now, the only way this thing will see the light of day in any kind of consumer aplication is if some corporation figures out how to make tons of money on it, while simultaneously locking out everyone else.

simplicimus:I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

Ivo Shandor:simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

Ivo Shandor:simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

???

I don't get it. How do you increase the kinetic energy of an electron? Electrons move at the speed of light. And it's a single particle. The highest energy state would be hard gamma as an ionized particle.

indarwinsshadow:I don't get it. How do you increase the kinetic energy of an electron? Electrons move at the speed of light. And it's a single particle. The highest energy state would be hard gamma as an ionized particle.

The closer a particle is to c (speed of light in a vacuum), the more energy it takes to push it faster. So if a particle is going 99.99% c, then you have to put a significant amount of energy into it to push it to 99.999. And then you would have to invest more than 10 times as much energy to push it to 99.9999, and so forth. Since an electron has mass, you will never get it to 100% c no matter how much energy you put into it.

indarwinsshadow:Ivo Shandor: simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

???

I don't get it. How do you increase the kinetic energy of an electron? Electrons move at the speed of light. And it's a single particle. The highest energy state would be hard gamma as an ionized particle.

Again, I don't get it.

An electron does not move at the speed of light. Only light moves at the speed of light. Electrons can move very fast (close to the speed of light) but they have mass so they require energy to accelerate them.

Benevolent Misanthrope:So? I guarantee you, nothing will happen with it. The great advances of the past that have led to cell phones, Internet, and so forth are over. Now, the only way this thing will see the light of day in any kind of consumer aplication is if some corporation figures out how to make tons of money on it, while simultaneously locking out everyone else.

There is absolutely a consumer application for this. A black hole generator would easily provide moments of entertainment before I destroyed the world because I'm too lazy to manually rake leaves off the lawn.

simplicimus:Ivo Shandor: simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

indarwinsshadow:Ivo Shandor: simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

It does increase the speed of the electrons by a small amount, but those electrons are already moving at almost the speed of light when they enter the device. The main purpose is to increase the kinetic energy of the electrons.

???

I don't get it. How do you increase the kinetic energy of an electron? Electrons move at the speed of light. And it's a single particle. The highest energy state would be hard gamma as an ionized particle.

Again, I don't get it.

Electrons DON'T move at the speed of light, unless that's the joke. (no coffee yet so my sarcasmometer is offline)

These power boosters offer an extraordinary level of acceleration, clocking in 300 million electron volts per meter. By comparison, that is around 10 times faster than that of the SLAC linear accelerator, which requires two miles to match what the tiny chip accelerators can do in 100 feet.

I was about to ask why 10 times faster was 100 times shorter, then I figured it out. Which makes this post pointless. But yet...click.

simplicimus:I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

Particle physics often measures momentum in electron volts.

The electron volt unit, a unit of energy, has dimensions, which are mass*length2/time2, like velocity has the dimensions length/time like miles/hour or km/second.

If you divide electron volts by the speed of light, which is a velocity, you get mass * length / time (by cancelling out dimensions) as the resulting dimensions and eV/c as the units, which are the same dimensions as units of momentum (since momentum is mass * velocity, which again is distance/time).

Then with some math, they set the speed of light to a constant of 1 rather than a big long number, so the c on eV/c might as well not be there, so you just get it in electron volts.

If you divide by the speed of light again, you get just mass left over and no length/time, so you can also use eV/c2 as a unit of mass, but once again, by reducing c to 1, it cancels out and they just use eV as the units again.

LrdPhoenix:simplicimus: I'm not really all that stupid, but what meaning has been assigned to acceleration? Pretty sure it doesn't refer to speed of electrons.

Particle physics often measures momentum in electron volts.

The electron volt unit, a unit of energy, has dimensions, which are mass*length2/time2, like velocity has the dimensions length/time like miles/hour or km/second.

If you divide electron volts by the speed of light, which is a velocity, you get mass * length / time (by cancelling out dimensions) as the resulting dimensions and eV/c as the units, which are the same dimensions as units of momentum (since momentum is mass * velocity, which again is distance/time).

Then with some math, they set the speed of light to a constant of 1 rather than a big long number, so the c on eV/c might as well not be there, so you just get it in electron volts.

If you divide by the speed of light again, you get just mass left over and no length/time, so you can also use eV/c2 as a unit of mass, but once again, by reducing c to 1, it cancels out and they just use eV as the units again.

Also note, the reason the energy units have dimensions of mass * length2/time2 is that the equation for energy (or work as it's usually known) is Work = force * distance. The equation for force is F = mass * acceleration, so Work = mass * acceleration * distance. And acceleration is change in velocity/change in time. So, if you put it all together you get:Work = mass * (distance/time)/time * distance (just ignoring the deltas on acceleration), and with some simplification you get Work (or Energy) = mass * distance2 / time2

If anybody wants to read about how the thing actually works, instead of the Fox-News-reading-level TFA that leaked out of some scientifically illiterate journalism school dropout's ass, the source of the source has a reasonable summary and cites the actual article (E. A. Peralta et al., Nature, 27 Sept 2013 (10.1038/nature12664) ). Highlights include the requirements for a 60 MeV electron beam to start, and a Ti:sapphire laser illuminating the chip. Neat trick, though, and I hope to see it develop.